But the substance of our permanent literature is as faulty as its form. It does not bear marks of a new, free, vigorous mind at work, looking at things from the American point of view, and though it put its thought in antique forms, yet thinking originally and for itself. It represents the average thought of respectable men, directed to some particular subject, and their average morality. It represents nothing more; how could it while the ablest men have gone off to politics or trade? It is such literature as almost anybody might get up if you would give him a little time to make the preliminary studies. There is little in it that is national; little individual and of the writer's own mind; it is ground out in the public literary mill. It has no noble sentiments, no great ideas, nothing which makes you burn; nothing which makes you much worse or much better. You may feed on this literature all your days, and whatsoever you may gain in girth, you shall not take in thought enough to add half an inch to your stature.
Out of every hundred American literary works printed since the century began, about eighty will be of this character. Compare the four most conspicuous periodicals of America with the four great quarterlies of England, and you see how inferior our literature is to theirs—in all things, in form and in substance too. The European has the freedom of a well-bred man—it appears in the movement of his thought, his use of words, in the easy grace of his sentences, and the general manner of his work; the American has the stiffness and limitations of a big, raw boy in the presence of his schoolmaster. They are proud of being English, and so have a certain lofty nationality which appears in their thought and the form thereof, even in the freedom to use and invent new words. Our authors of this class seem ashamed that they are Americans, and accordingly are timid, ungraceful and weak. They dare not be original when they could. Hence this sort of literature is dull. A man of the average mind and conscience, heart and soul, studies a particular subject a short time—for this is the land of brief processes—and writes a book thereof, or thereon; a critic of the same average makes his special study of the book, not its theme, "reviews" the work; is as ready, and able to pass judgment on Bowditch's translation of La Place in ten days after its appearance as ten years, and distributes praise and blame, not according to the author's knowledge, but the critic's ignorant caprice, and then average men read the book and the critique with no immoderate joy or unmeasured grief. They learn some new facts, no new ideas, and get no lofty impulse. The book was written without inspiration, without philosophy, and is read with small profit. Yet it is curious to observe the praise which such men receive, how soon they are raised to the House of Lords in English literature. I have known three American Sir Walter Scotts, half a dozen Addisons, one or two Macaulays, a historian that was Hume and Gibbon both in one; several Burnses, and Miltons by the quantity, not "mute," the more is the pity, but "inglorious" enough; nay, even vain-glorious at the praise which some penny-a-liner, or dollar-a-pager foolishly gave their cheap extemporary stuff. In sacred literature it is the same: in a single winter at Boston we had two American Saint Johns, in full blast for several months. Though no Felix trembles, there are now extant in the United States not less than six American Saint Pauls, in no manner of peril except the most dangerous—of idle praise.
A living, natural, and full-grown literature contains two elements. One is of mankind in general; that is human and universal. The other is of the tribe in special, and of the writer in particular. This is national and even personal: you see the idiosyncracy of the nation and the individual author in the work. The universal human substance accepts the author's form, and the public wine of mankind runs into the private bottle of the author. Thus the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament is fresh and original in substance and in form; the two elements are plain enough, the universal and the particular. The staple of the Psalms of David is human, of mankind, it is trust in God; but the twist, the die, the texture, the pattern, all that is Hebrew—of the tribe, and personal—of David, shepherd, warrior, poet, king. You see the pastoral hill-sides of Judea in his holy hymns; nay, "Uriah's beauteous wife" now and then sidles in to his sweetest psalm. The Old Testament books smell of Palestine, of its air and its soil. The Rose of Sharon has Hebrew earth about its roots. The geography of the Holy Land, its fauna and its flora both, even its wind and sky, its early and its latter rain, all appear in the literature of historian and bard. It is so in the Iliad. You see how the sea looked from Homer's point of view, and know how he felt the west wind, cold and raw. The human element has an Ionian form and a Homeric hue. The ballads of the people in Scotland and England are national in the same way; the staple of human life is wrought into the Scottish form. Before the Germans had any permanent national literature of this character, their fertile mind found vent in legends, popular stories, now the admiration of the learned. These had at home the German dress, but as the stories travelled into other lands, they kept their human flesh and blood, but took a different garb and acquired a different complexion from every country which they visited, and, like the streams of their native Swabia, took the color of the soil they travelled through.
The permanent and instantial literature of America is not national in this sense. It has little that is American; it might as well be written by some book-wright in Leipsic or London, and then imported. The individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy binding of the work. The nationality of America is only stamped on the lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back.
Is the book a History? it is written with no such freedom as you should expect of a writer, looking at the breadth of the world from the lofty stand-point of America. There is no new philosophy of history in it. You would not think it was written in a democracy that keeps the peace without armies or a national jail. Mr. Macaulay writes the history of England as none but a North-Briton could do. Astonishingly well-read, equipped with literary skill at least equal to the masterly art of Voltaire, mapping out his subject like an engineer, and adorning it like a painter, you yet see, all along, that the author is a Scotchman and a whig. Nobody else could have written so. It is of Mr. Macaulay. But our American writer thinks about matters just as everybody else does; that is, he does not think at all, but only writes what he reads, and then, like the good-natured bear in the nursery story, "thinks he has been thinking." It is no such thing, he has been writing the common opinion of common men, to get the applause of men as common as himself.
Is the book of Poetry? the substance is chiefly old, the form old, the allusions are old. It is poetry of society, not of nature. You meet in it the same everlasting mythology, the same geography, botany, zoölogy, the same symbols; a new figure of speech suggested by the sight of nature, not the reading of books, you could no more find than a fresh shad in the Dead Sea. You take at random eight or ten "American poets" of this stamp, you see at once what was the favorite author with each new bard; you often see what particular work of Shelley, or Tennyson, or Milton, or George Herbert, or, if the man has culture enough, of Goethe, or Uhland, Jean Paul, or Schiller, suggested the "American Original." His inspiration comes from literature, not from the great universe of nature or of human life. You see that this writer has read Percy's Reliques, and the German Wunderhorn; but you would not know that he wrote in a republic—in a land full of new life, with great rivers and tall mountains, with maple and oak trees that turn red in the autumn, amongst a people who hold town-meetings, have free schools for everybody, read newspapers voraciously, who have lightning rods on their steeples, ride in railroads, are daguerreotyped by the sun, and who talk by lightning from Halifax to New Orleans, who listen to the whippoorwill and the bobolink, who believe in Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, in the devil and the five points of Calvinism. You would not know where our poet lived, or that he lived anywhere. Reading the Iliad, you doubt that Homer was born blind; but our bard seems to have been deaf also, and for expressing what was national in his time, might likewise have been dumb.
Is it a volume of Sermons? they might have been written at Edinburgh, Madrid, or Constantinople as well as in New England; as well preached to the "Homo Sapiens" of Linnæus, or the Man in the Moon, as to the special audience that heard, or heard them not, but only paid for having the things preached. There is nothing individual about them; the author seems as impersonal as Spinoza's conception of God. The sermons are like an almanac calculated for the meridian of no place in particular, for no time in special. There is no allusion to any thing American. The author never mentions a river this side of the Jordan; knows no mountain but Lebanon, Zion, and Carmel, and would think it profane to talk of the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, of Monadnock and the Androscoggin. He mentions Babylon and Jerusalem, not New York and Baltimore; you would never dream that he lived in a church without a bishop, and a state without a king, in a democratic nation that held three million slaves, with ministers chosen by the people. He is surrounded, clouded over, and hid by the traditions of the "ages of faith" behind him. He never thanks God for the dew and snow, only for "the early and the latter rain" of a classic sacred land; a temperance man, he blesses God for the wine because the great Psalmist did so thousands of years ago. He speaks of the olive and the fig-tree which he never saw, not of the apple-tree and the peach before his eyes all day long, their fruit the joy of his children's heart. If you guessed at his time and place, you would think he lived, not under General Taylor, but under King Ahab, or Jeroboam; that his audience rode on camels or in chariots, not in steam-cars; that they fought with bows and arrows against the children of Moab; that their favorite sin was the worship of some graven image, and that they made their children pass through the fire unto Moloch, not through the counting-house unto Mammon. You would not know whether the preacher was married or a bachelor, rich or poor, saint or sinner; you would probably conclude he was not much of a saint, nor even much of a sinner.
The authors of this portion of our literature seem ashamed of America. One day she will take her revenge. They are the parasites of letters, and live on what other men have made classic. They would study the Holy Land, Greece, Etruria, Egypt, Nineveh, spots made famous by great and holy men, and let the native races of America fade out, taking no pains to study the monuments which so swiftly pass away from our own continent. It is curious that most of the accounts of the Indians of North America come from men not natives here, from French and Germans; and characteristic that we should send an expedition to the Dead Sea, while wide tracts of this continent lie all untouched by the white man's foot; and, also, that while we make such generous and noble efforts to christianize and bless the red, yellow, and black heathens at the world's end, we should leave the American Indian and Negro to die in savage darkness, the South making it penal to teach a black man to write or read.
Yet, there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it may be called, which is wholly indigenous and original. The lives of the early martyrs and confessors are purely Christian, so are the legends of saints and other pious men: there was nothing like this in the Hebrew or heathen literature; cause and occasion were alike wanting for it. So we have one series of literary productions that could be written by none but Americans, and only here: I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves. But as these are not the work of the men of superior culture, they hardly help to pay the scholar's debt. Yet all the original romance of America is in them, not in the white man's novel.